When People magazine listed its “Best Books of the Fall,” they prominently featured “feminist icon” Gloria Steinem and her new book My Life on the Road as a “delight” full of “bracing insights.”
So it’s not surprising that in its cover story on the upcoming visit of Pope Francis, People looked at “Where He Stands” and skipped right over abortion. Here’s what came under “Women” – just the ordination part the feminists demand.
“The priesthood is still out of the question, but Francis encourages female leadership in the Church: ‘The feminine genius is needed..”
On the same page, People reported “Hillary Clinton has said she envies people who will meet him.” The magazine’s only categories were women, gays, greed, global warming, and sex abuse, a tidy liberal-media list. You’d think the pope were only a politician. People doesn’t care how he feels about boring topics like the Bible or relations with other religious faiths.
Here’s what came under greed:
His personal frugality dovetails with his vision of “a Church which is poor and for the poor.” Denouncing trickle-down economics and the “idolization” of money over people, Francis suspended a German bishop who spent $43 million on a mansion. And with Syrian refugees flooding Europe, he directed churches to take them in, starting with the Vatican.
And global warming:
With experience in chemistry, Francis issued a data-driven encyclical this year saying humanity’s unfettered pursuit of profit risks turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”
On gay issues, People lunged for the "who am I to judge" quote and touted "he transformed the Chruch's tone from condemnation to compassion," but added correctly "but did not overturn its stand that homosexual acts are a sin." Church officials would say the church condemns the sin, but compassionately calls on the sinner to reform -- just as they call on every sinner in the church to reform.
The cover story is largely positive, about the pope “whose vision is inspiring the world.” That’s easier to promote when you’ve left out the troublesome stuff that liberals find disagreeable. It included Stephen Colbert calling him “Pope Hope” and Jimmy Kimmel adding “Pope Fran-tastic.”
